The transnational spaces of things: South Asian textiles in Britain and The Grammar of Ornament

Abstract

South Asian, or ‘Indian’, textiles have long been both apparent and appreciated within British culture. They form an important part of what we can see as a British Asian transnational space of things. This paper examines this space and the cultural exchanges that constitute it, in order to raise wider issues concerning the relations between transnationality, space and histories of material culture. The paper starts with some contextual observations on approaches to transnationality that foreground material culture. The appeal and problems of accounts that ‘follow’ things transnationally are reviewed, and matters of ‘design’, ‘style’ and ‘pattern’ are argued to be a fertile edge to this approach. As an illustration, the paper then focuses more specifically on a case study, Owen Jones's The Grammar of Ornament (first published in 1856), relating its representation and reproduction of Indian patterns to the material collections of South Asian textiles within the Victorian ‘exhibitionary complex’, examining the material transformations made to Indian ornament in these processes, and setting these acquisitions and alterations in the context of Victorian British design culture. By way of conclusion, the paper draws out what this narrative of The Grammar of Ornament says more generally about how we approach transnationality, and specifically transnational space, through things and material culture.